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The Aboriginal Memorial and the Militarisation of Australian History

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The Aboriginal Memorial and the Militarisation of Australian History I A N M c L E A N l d ı v a n 48 — JULY / 2019 The Aboriginal Memorial and the Militarisation of Australian History The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living [who]… anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.1 How is it that some art is forever contemporary, speaking afresh to each new generation as if in it the dead advance their claims and the living seek their redemption? Even the state seeks its deliverance in such art, building magnificent museums to preserve and revere it and study its genealogies. To stay contemporary requires the gift of reincarnation. Neither the artist nor the artwork can control this remaking and the new meanings it generates, but the upside is a certain immortality, a compact with the future and past, with the ancestors and those to come, and most of all with power. This is what a memorial is or does: it is the politics of memory. This idea can be found in the conception of The Aboriginal Memorial (1988), which has been on permanent display in the cathedral spaces of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra for more than thirty years (except when it travelled overseas as art of the Olympic Festival at the turn of the twenty-first century). In its format of painted upright hollow logs, the artwork draws inspiration from the culmination of a traditional Yolngu mortuary ceremony. After the conclusion of the ritual singing and dancing around the painted log which houses the bones of the deceased clan member, it is left standing near the waterhole—the bones and sacrificial tree slowly decaying until they have returned to the watery home of the Serpent from which they originally sprang, ready to be born again. In guiding the deceased’s spirit to its waterhole (homeland) to ensure its reincarnation, the ceremony is future-orientated, not nostalgic. Turning to the past and future simultaneously, the clan reflects on a life passed in order to imagine a future becoming. In this respect, the upright log —upright like the tree from which it came—is a memorial site where can be heard the whispering of the dead and those to come. The Aboriginal Memorial is not this ceremony and nor are its National Gallery of Australia viewers engaged in a Yolngu mortuary ritual, but The Aboriginal Memorial is intended to draw them into a national mortuary ceremony of sorts. As well as the painted trunk of a eucalypt, The Aboriginal Memorial shares with the traditional Yolngu mortuary ceremony a self-conscious temporality that, at a moment of passing, turns to the past and future simultaneously. The passing upon which it turned was the bicentenary of the symbolic birth of the nation on 26 January 1788, when the first British 49 — JULY / 2019 I A N M c L E A N colony on the Australian continent was founded. The Aboriginal Memorial asks its viewers to reflect on the birth of the nation that issued from this colony, and particularly on the repressed, unhonoured histories of Aboriginal deaths in its “frontier wars”. New South Wales (NSW), as the colony was named, was established as a prison ruled by a military dictatorship, not a free community from which nations are made. However, as prisoners served their terms and regained their freedom, and the colony attracted entrepreneurs seeking trade and profit, the prison acquired the rudiments of a free settlement. The first germ of an idea for an Australian nation appeared in the 1820s, when the rule of civil law replaced military law and some free settlers started campaigning for self-government. Gains were increasingly made over the coming decades and as the new century came around, by which time the continent boasted six self- governing settler colonies—those colonies federated into a nation-state with a constitution and law that guaranteed its newly won sovereignty. However, it was a premature state and not just because of its limited sovereignty, with “no power to declare war or peace… [unable] to make treaties with foreign powers and… no diplomatic status abroad.”2 Still in search of nationhood, its people were yet to detach themselves from the Empire, and the British monarch remained their head of state. In the initial period of nation-building, settler colonists secured the continent through a militarised moving frontier that, over about one hundred years, “dispersed” (a settler euphemism for killing) the Indigenous populations across most of the continent. It was not a state organised military campaign of conquest but an ad-hoc clearing operation conducted at a local level. Because the British Empire had claimed the land according to the “Discovery Doctrine”, it was in the legal interests of the Empire and settlers to make it a wilderness, desert or terra nullius—unimproved land still in the state of nature over which only wild animals roamed.3 However, the Empire and its high ranking officers kept to the moral high ground, hesitating to condone this campaign of terror, which was a deliberate policy advocated by many settlers and widely supported by the local press. Their leading representative, William Charles Wentworth, forceful advocate of self-government and a free press, declared in a speech in the NSW Legislative Council in 1844: The civilised people had come in and the savage must go back... it was not the policy of a wise government to attempt the perpetuation of the aboriginal race… They must give way before the arms, aye! even the diseases of civilised nations—they must give way before they attain the power of those nations.4 In casting his argument in the tragic tenor of fate rather than conquest, Wentworth sidestepped moral responsibility for the resulting genocide and established the basis for terra nullius on the premise of savagery giving way to civilisation as if it were a natural or divine law. Thus, Wentworth tapped into a widely held sentiment of the time that justified the advance of European civilisation, most powerfully expressed in Herbert Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest”, conceived at this time. It became the motto of Spencer’s social evolutionism. The most influential sociology and philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century, its values shaped the ethos of modernity. In reflecting on this formation of the nation and particularly on those indigenes swept away in its frontier wars, The Aboriginal Memorial sought to imagine—in the spirit of the traditional Yolngu mortuary ceremony—an Indigenous future, and in conducting this imagining by aesthetic means, it aimed to touch the emotional nerve and sublime regions of the national consciousness. l d ı v a n 50 — JULY / 2019 The Aboriginal Memorial and the Militarisation of Australian History Conceived by curator Djon Mundine,5 made by forty-three artists from fifteen clans living in the Ramingining area (an Indigenous community in the Northern Territory, east of Darwin), commissioned for the 1988 Biennale of Sydney and funded by the NGA, The Aboriginal Memorial was pronounced a masterpiece by the Biennale’s Artistic Director Nick Waterlow and the Director of the NGA James Mollison—thus striking a chord at both an aesthetic and institutional level. Artist and critic Nigel Lendon observed that Mollison’s intervention ensured its destiny went beyond “a [biennale] setting given to ephemeral installations” and was incorporated “into the canon of Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia”6—though the Australian Bicentenary had inspired in this Biennale an unusual focus on the Australian national canon. “For the first time,” wrote Waterlow in the catalogue, “a small number of key Australian antecedents will be shown side by side their peers from other countries” and within an historical context, because only by learning “from our history” can we “come to grips with crucial problems of identity and creativity.”7 This historical frame of the 1988 Biennale, said Waterlow, “asked: where does Australian art come from?” In this respect, he continued, The Aboriginal Memorial is “the single most important statement of this Biennale.”8 Located about a kilometre from the original landfall of the colonial settlers,9 Biennale of Sydney viewers came to The Aboriginal Memorial in the low-lit cavernous space of Pier 2/3 at Sydney Harbour’s Walsh Bay after passing through contemporary installation art by international stars such as Rebecca Horn, Hermann Nitsch and Arnulf Rainer. 51 — JULY / 2019 I A N M c L E A N Art historian Professor Terry Smith argued that the aesthetic innovation of The Aboriginal Memorial hinges on a structure of ambivalence evident across several registers,10 the most important of which according to curator Susan Jenkins, is “the ambiguity of a memorial within a gallery.”11 Unlike a monument, a memorial is a site of ritual that in its periodic participatory performances creates and sustains a sense of community by reifying a memorable collective event, in effect giving it an ancestral status. While the experience of art objects is conventionally more contemplative and individually focused, they also are sites of reification or religiosity through their aesthetic affects. Mundine intended The Aboriginal Memorial to keep in play this ambivalent relationship between art and memorial—to be both a ritualistic site in its own right in which periodic performances would take place, as well as an artwork for more private meditation. Because a national art museum is a memorial to the nation, the NGA was the ideal site to keep this ambivalence in play.
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